For innovative and effective assessment strategies to record and grade projects, collections of projects, and semester or yearlong student work, you can use the same digital communication skills you teach the students. Following are three areas where these digital communication tools can be helpful.

Feedback, comments, and critiques for assessment with Adobe® Acrobat®

You can use Adobe Acrobat Professional to give students feedback, engage students in peer collaboration and critique assess student work, and collect data. Here are tips to use Acrobat across the teaching and learning process:

When students are completing individual or group projects, have them turn in their work as PDF files at major milestones. You can use the commenting and Text Edit tools to easily provide feedback for students to improve their work and keep them aware of your expectations. You might also instruct students to review the feedback, make appropriate changes, and assess the difference between the two versions.

Encourage students to think critically about their work by having them perform peer reviews. Students can exchange PDF documents through e-mail or engage in browser-based reviews. Your assessment of overall student work can then include how critically students thought about peer work and how useful their feedback was in helping peers improve their work.

Have students convert their final products into PDF files for you to assess via e-mail or through browser- based reviews. You can use stamp and drawing tools to grade the work. Using PDF files provides a way to archive the graded work and easily return it to students.

You can create PDF surveys and quizzes to assess student knowledge and collect the resulting data into spreadsheets to assist with assessment methods and data collection.

Digital documentation for assessment with Adobe Premiere® Elements or Photoshop® Elements

You can use still images in slide shows or time-lapse videos to document the learning process and assess student progress and their final products. Following are some ideas for using video or slide shows for learning and assessment:

Ask students to take digital images of their project progress from start to finish, perhaps having them take pictures on certain days or at certain time intervals. At the conclusion of a project, ask them to submit their pictures as time-lapse videos along with their final products so you can use the images to assess their progress.

Use Tags and Collections in Photoshop Elements to help organize and assess student work. You can view an example of this type of assessment on the Digital Kids Club site. Instruct students to take pictures of successful and unsuccessful group interactions and create a slide show representing how their group worked together and explaining why the interactions were or were not successful.

E-Portfolios for assessment with Adobe ContributeTM or Adobe Acrobat

You can use e-portfolios for assessment: as a documentation of student growth, a display of their best work, or an aggregate of all their work. Students can generate these portfolios for distribution onand offline by using Contribute or Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Have students use Contribute for posting contents into a web e-portfolio. Choose any type of portfolio to assess, and throughout the semester or year, have students post their work to their designated web pages that serve as a student's e-portfolio. At the conclusion of the semester or year, review all student work to assess the level of the work, any content areas or skills that need improvement, and the students' progress throughout a range of time. This type of e-portfolio works best if web access is availableso the portfolio can be viewed anywhere and can be shared with parents.

If web distribution is not available because of restrictions on student web publishing, students can similarly aggregate their work by using Adobe Acrobat Professional. At the conclusion of the semester or year, you can collect the PDF portfolios via e-mail or disk to assess student progress. This works best if CD or e-mail distribution is used for viewing the portfolios, which can also be archived and sent home via CD for parents to view.

From Adobe

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